TLS on Renaissances

on Renaissances

Powers of Writing
by Jonathan Benthall
a review of
Jack Goody's RENAISSANCES The one or the many? 322pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, £15.99 (US $27.99). 978 0 521 745161

The United States has held itself together by demoting languages other than English. The cultural coherence of China, with its linguistic diversity, owes much to its logographic script (where signs represent units of meaning rather than units of sound), which facilitates an immense internal market. Therefore the European Union, being of necessity multilingual, should consider dropping its phonetic script and adopting the Chinese alternative. Sir Jack Goody's logic is perfect, but he is not angling to be commissioned by President Van Rompuy to help push through this somewhat ambitious reform. He is not an "applied" anthropologist.
But nor does he aspire, I think, to an Olympian objectivity, though others have seen in him a successor to the great nineteenth-century synthesizers. His aim, in throwing out such a provocation in Renaissances, is to unsettle what he sees as the Eurocentric complacency that turns interpretations of our past into a kind of salvation history. Goody admits that he may be slightly exaggerating the achievements of the Eastern civilizations and playing down those of Europe, but "if so, it is a corrective that was to be made, given the continuing trend of much social science, not only western".
Literacy was at the heart of the Bronze Age transformation, together with advanced agriculture and the growth of cities, bureaucracies and social classes based on landlordism. But whereas other scholars have emphasized a split between East and West as the highest level historical divergence, Goody prefers to see Eurasia as a unified field, with the potential for a "knowledge society", distinct from sub-Saharan Africa and other regions that never experienced a Bronze Age and have remained predominantly oral. read more Out with stereotypes of Asiatic despotism and stagnation. China was the world's major export manufacturer before the nineteenth century; India's mathematicians gave us "Arabic" numerals, rescuing Europe from our lumbering Roman arithmetic. The Phoenicians, who invented our alphabet and also provide examples of early democracy, are largely "written out of the Antiquity script". The West's commercial and scientific supremacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have been no more than a temporary surge that is now receding.
Within Eurasia, the highest level differentiation was, according to Goody, between the three Abrahamic monotheisms and the more eclectic spirit of religion that prevailed elsewhere.
Goody is at his most original in his analysis of "iconophobia", the banning of naturalistic representations, which was a marked feature of the monotheisms (though not unknown further east, as in early Buddhism). At various periods, iconophobia inhibited the visual and performing arts. Moreover, since God was omniscient, it was possible to dismiss scientific inquiry into the natural world as redundant. Yet "elements of scepticism were not altogether absent from even the most rigid of religious beliefs".
Goody defends the contested idea of a Dark Age following the fall of the Roman Empire and the collapse of trade in Western Europe. The European Renaissance rediscovered the arts of the Greeks and the Romans, and thereby diluted Christian hegemony with a secular pluralism. In the sciences, an allimportant channel of continuity with ancient Classical achievements was via Islam. The sphere of religion shrank, while new sources of energy were retrieved from an earlier era and aligned towards the future. With a qualified acknowledgement to the monumentally unfashionable Arnold Toynbee, Goody draws attention to other renaissances, or efflorescences, in world history. The opposite of a renaissance is a "reformation", which looks back to a fixed text of sacred origin. Renaissances and reformations are possible in any literate society. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Islam experienced its period of philosophical and scientific flowering, one of the drivers for which was the introduction of paper, originally a Chinese invention, by Arabs.
So how unique was the Italian Renaissance? Goody draws attention to a number of less prominent renaissances within Christianity.
Byzantium, for instance, had its own dark age, and dark ages alternate with efflorescences.
In a series of chapters (three of them written in collaboration with Stephen Fennell), Goody tests his model of renaissances against the evidence from Islam, Hinduism and China. He concludes that the unique feature of the European Renaissance was its looking back for revitalization to worldviews that had been restricted by the Church, some of them atheistic and materialistic. India and China, by contrast, accumulated their achievements gradually, less hampered by the problem of circumscription by the divine. Europe's Renaissance had to "make up for lost time in a rush", and was given an added spur by New World colonization.
A long and complex chapter on Islam reminds us that, originally, both Christianity and Islam were radical reformist reactions to Judaism. Islam experienced over the centuries a number of temporary and local efflorescences.
Under the Abbasid caliphate, for instance, Greek scientific literature was rediscovered, but the revival did not extend to an admiration for Greek literature or sculpture or architecture. Goody sums up this long history as "the ebb and flow of a civilization in constant contact with others", an alternation between traditionalism and rationality. By contrast with the Italian Renaissance, Islam never institutionalized the "secular vision".
Another chapter examines the case of Judaism: first the "Judaeo-Arab synthesis" in Andalusia, which Goody does not hesitate to call a "golden age", and later the Emancipation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Ashkenazi or East European Jews succeeded in freeing themselves not only from the limits placed on them by Christendom, but also from self-imposed religious restrictions. This efflorescence of Jewish culture was enhanced by immigration to America. Iconophobia was abandoned to the extent that Jews were able to play a leading role in developing the new visual media of the twentieth century. But the introduction of secular thought into Judaism by Moses Mendelssohn and others was more a result of looking laterally at the world around it than of looking backwards.
One can only admire Goody's comparativist ambition, his omnivorous curiosity, his disdain for disciplinary boundaries, and his willingness to dispute received opinion. Two questions remain. First, about his concept of religion. He has elsewhere criticized two of his contemporaries, Eric Hobsbawm - a friend to whom this book is dedicated - and the late Ernest Gellner, for discounting the importance of religion as an autonomous determinant. But rather oddly for a great social anthropologist - whose discipline specializes in holding up words such as "civilization" and "art" to the light - he does not seem to want to question the definition of religion and allied categories, being satisfied with the assertion that "what religion is about" is "the transcendental". His study of Eurasian world-views might have been enriched by the insight of a scholar such as Peter Beyer, who argues that a model of religion based on Christianity, and to a lesser extent on Islam, was imposed on regions such as India and China, but was later widely adopted as a global category. "Hinduism", for instance, was a neologism formulated first by European scholars, and later adopted by Indian intellectuals. Such a shift would enrich Goody's argument, which rightly stresses the porous and contested boundaries of the religious field.
The second question concerns Africa. Goody made his name originally as an Africanist, but sub-Saharan Africa figures in this latest book almost entirely as a negative: no Bronze Age, no long tradition of literacy except under Christian and Islamic influence, no urbanization, no haute cuisine, no "culture of flowers" (the title of one of his earlier books). Yet Goody's reputation as a stern opponent of all racism and a defender of oral cultures is unquestionable. He has always stressed the power of writing to oppress illiterate people, as well as its liberating capacity.
A clue may be found in the epigraph to this book, T. S. Eliot's "In my end is my beginning".
Goody read English Literature when he went up to Cambridge in 1938, and was first attracted to anthropology by the notes to The Waste Land. It is as if, now entering his tenth decade, he has achieved a personal renaissance, looking backwards in his life, as well as alongside and forwards, to present us with a brilliant flowering of the intellect.
Goody has recently turned his attention again to Africa in Ghana Observed, Africa Reconsidered (2007), but that is a collation of essays written over forty years. He has been charged by another student of world civilizations, Bruce Lincoln, with underestimating the damage that exploitation by the colonial powers has done to Africa. However, previously impoverished Asian nations now seem to be able to connect more successfully with the world economy. Goody's early fieldwork experience in Ghana, according to his most thoughtful adherent, Keith Hart, has always underpinned his venture into comparativism, since he was politically engaged in the project to make possible a new world order after the Second World War. Hart notes that Goody - unlike many other social anthropologists of his generation - has spurned both a "myopic ethnography" focusing on discrete tribes and the seductions of binary structuralism à la Lévi-Strauss.
Borrowing a lens from Goody, Hart sees the Western democratic project as secondary to the long Eurasian record of class stratification, which is now intensified so as to dominate the world economy. Sub-Saharan Africa was on the whole more egalitarian than Eurasia, and held together by kinship rather than by land rights. Africa has undergone a recent population explosion and a late, extremely fast and wide-ranging urban revolution. It missed out on earlier machine revolutions, and is far behind in the present one associated with digitalization.
New kinds of state sustained by foreign powers, urban elites and unregulated city markets have been grafted onto societies organized in a different way. So some of the task of explicitly fitting sub-Saharan Africa into Goody's interpretative scheme may have been carried out for him already. The implications for the future of that continent are troubling, though West African music and imaginative literature, for example, would seem to qualify fully as "efflorescences".
Renaissances is a magisterial book, despite stretches of densely potted history and some ungainly repetitions. Another possible gap for this indefatigable author to fill in would be Central Eurasia, from which originated several of the greatest Muslim scientists and philosophers such as Avicenna and al-Biruni. A recently published historical study, Empires of the Silk Road, by Christopher Beckwith (reviewed in the TLS, April 16), emphasizes the heroic warlord as a key figure underlying that region's commerce and radiating into the continent as a whole.
One of the many discussions that Goody's model of history will stimulate relates to the future of Islam and its deficiency in what he calls the "permanent institutionalization of the secular in universities or academies". There is clearly a crisis of authority in Islam today as a result of various fundamentalist trends. But if Islam has known its "golden ages", and its history is so intertwined with that of the West, there can be no inherent reason in its theology why it should not experience a full-blown renaissance, just as the Europeans did, making up for lost time six centuries ago. Contemporary Islam since 9/11 is, for the Tunisian Muslim writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, "inconsolable in its destitution". Jack Goody's book may be specially recommended to Muslims looking for an intellectual complement to the current, entirely understandable preoccupation in most of the Muslim world with international politics. As John Wansbrough, the qur'anic scholar, wrote of the concern in foundational Islam for community cohesion, "The notion of decline from an ideal state is seldom accompanied by a conviction that reversal is impossible . . . . Nostalgia and optimism are not, after all, mutually exclusive".